MUSIC IN REVIEW

1 6 6 Y M U S I C I N R E V I E W R . C L I F T O N S P A R G O Few singers so supremely talented have been so consistently maligned by critics as the Libertines’ co-frontman, sometime Babyshamble , and solo artist, Peter Doherty. He has been accused of every variety of harm and self-indulgence, from dwelling in his lyrics on drug use, rehab, and relapses to aching after lost loves and flimsy antiquarian fantasies; he is reprimanded for being persistently unable to see beyond the strife of his own pained psyche – time and again his songs are described as sloppy, scru√y, careless, lazy. The notorious love-hate spats with his longtime best friend and co-frontman, Carl Barat, the descent into drug addiction and the frequent mess made of his personal life, the fervent chaos of Libertines shows – add to that Doherty’s bad habit of sometimes not showing up for them – have long fired the charges of dysfunction and wasted potential. By now the accusations have come to tell us far more about the bourgeois norms and the impulse toward moralizing in music criticism than about the songs themselves . Happy to substitute gawking estimations of the herointroubled singer’s biography for engagement with the music, too many listeners fail to read him right. It is perhaps not so much a deliberate e√ort to disparage Doherty’s tastes and talent as a 1 6 7 R real inability to recognize his aesthetic, indeed his entire approach to music. The Libertines came crashing onto the British pop charts in 2002 with their Up the Bracket album, buoyed by a well-charting title track and the topical gem ‘‘Time for Heroes,’’ about police brutality. Immediately they were at the epicenter of an indie music resurgence. Along with bands such as The Strokes and The White Stripes, and later the Arctic Monkeys, the Libertines were part of a movement that retrieved a soulful, urgently blues, part punk, part garage energy that had fans everywhere hailing the return of true rock ’n’ roll. The Clash’s Mick Jones produced their first album, and the 2004 follow-up as well, and the comparisons that followed were all but inevitable, even justified. The Libertines had the songs, the stage antics, the always live energy even in the studio, and the wide-ranging musical imagination to suit. The Clash’s London Calling was the album that had messed up punk, ruined it, expanded it, throwing open the doors in 1979 to make an entire generation understand that blues, jazz, country, and reggae could be played punkishly, that great music is always about the intersections. No rock band in the two decades following met the challenge of that doors-thrown-open diversity with greater enthusiasm than The Libertines. From the beginning this brash new band was unevenly punk, never as musically tight as its peers, the vocals one minute lilting, the next surging angrily, the guitars as edgy as Detroit garage but much looser. A splash of words sung too quickly to carry all the notes, then the slashing of a shrill guitar, suddenly the beat too seems to be rushing – a drunken, sloppy brimming of notes. Carl Barat’s vocals fall sideways, Doherty’s voice drifts into lush slurring , then floats upward; the guitars keep meeting and rejecting and rejoining. It’s as if nothing wants to stay locked in ∂/∂ but the drive of the Hassall-Powell rhythm team keeps it on track, and the scattered guitars suddenly line up, and there’s a gorgeous, wry harmonizing of the two vocal parts. Looseness is The Libertines’ aesthetic. Any great Libertines song is always in danger of falling apart. Even in the studio releases the arrangements often have the uncanny feel of a demo, like something played in a living room. Mick Jones was the perfect producer for the sound: if the guitars slashed a little too carelessly, if there were some vagrant notes 1 6 8 S P A R G O Y along the way, he’d let it stand, so long as the take had the energetic chaos and...